A Gesture With a Point

Had I been on the spot in Baghdad on Sunday, filing a dispatch for the Daily Beast, I would surely have written the following "lede" to a report on the elections:

"Iraqis, voting in their thousands, literally gave terrorists the finger yesterday. Braving blood-curdling threats of mayhem and messianic warnings of slaughter, men and women streamed to polling booths in Baghdad, Basra, Mosul and Fallujah. Having voted,...